TNG, DS9 & Enterprise Blu-ray News

TrekCore has published two extensive and fascinating multi-page interviews about the continuing and exhaustive multi-million dollar high-definition upgrade of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for Blu-ray.

As talked about previously, the show is undergoing a massive restoration that requires each episode to essentially go through the entire post-production process again. The end result though is a 25-year-old show that looks like it was shot yesterday and one of the most remarkable achievements for the Blu-ray format this year.

With the second season slated to hit stores December 4th, the website spoke with both the CBS Digital team and the heads of CBS Television Distribution Multimedia and asked some big questions that Trek fans have been wanting to know.

First up sales figures. Turns out CBS is extremely happy with the how the first season Blu-ray set sold as “I think what they estimated for a couple of months, or a month or so, sold in a week… and of course all the different divisions can’t wait to get their hands on it to sell it in their markets”.

The remastering workload has been split between two teams with the results undergoing careful quality control supervision to make sure continuity matches throughout. The big benefit to this is that the work flows much faster, so much so that “next year we’re shooting to get three seasons out” which means all seven seasons could be out and available in stores by mid-late 2014.

While the first season had two seconds of missing footage that had to be ‘upconverted’, the second season has no such lost footage. In fact, as already confirmed, all the required footage was found to present an optional extended version of the Emmy-winning courtroom episode “The Measure of a Man” on the set.

Talk has also come up about other “Star Trek” series coming to the format – specifically “Deep Space Nine” and “Enterprise”. Rumors of the latter making the jump soon have emerged, mainly because it was shot and produced in HD and thus doesn’t really require much remastering.

Asked about “Enterprise”, the two CBS Multimedia heads say “Let’s just say there’s talk… There are discussions happening as we speak. Discussions about other Star Trek entities, properties.” They also add they would love nothing more than to segue from upgrading TNG into upgrading DS9, but there’s no official green light as yet. However as long as fans keep expressing interest, and TNG Blu-ray sales go strong, the more likely it is to happen.